


golden mouths cry out

by Missy



Category: Heavenly Creatures (1994)
Genre: Aftermath, Altered Mental States, Alternate History, F/F, Romance, postcanon
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2010-12-20
Updated: 2010-12-20
Packaged: 2017-10-13 21:21:03
Rating: Mature
Warnings: Graphic Depictions Of Violence
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,557
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/141843
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/Missy/pseuds/Missy
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Juliet and Pauline - in repentance and in joy, together.</p>
            </blockquote>





	golden mouths cry out

**Author's Note:**

  * For [](https://archiveofourown.org/gifts).



> This is another fill for wiselyparanoid for Yuletide '10. I REALLY hope you like both this and the Futurama fic I sculpted from your prompts. Since you wanted an alternate history of what happens to Pauline and Juliet, I had to work at the facts of the case and twist them a bit. Therefore, this story is a mixture of the factual and the fictional, and no inference is meant or rights of propriety meant to be trampled upon.

The trial was, predictably, sensational.

Pauline reveled in the attention, grinning beside Juliet in her borrowed finery, waving to the reporters clustered outside the court building with their popping flashbulbs and fevered headlines. She was convinced that this was just an ugly footnote in the adventure they’d been living since they met so many months ago, and they would soon get out of this ugly brick-and-mortar building and fly away, back to Borovnia.

She tried to remember her lawyer’s instructions as they heard her through the crowds and to the proper table. The endless movie strip in her mind played future scenes of dramatically-lit confessions with sweeping violin-driven soundtracks. The lawyers would place them on the stand, so of course there would be dramatic stories of their madness, wild seconds of exuberance, but Pauline must maintain a veneer of innocence at all times, so she strained for the appearance of a Madonna bleeding behind glass, benevolent and sweet. She tried to think of Lana Turner on the stand at the Stompanado murder trial when they seated her at the defense table – a properly-timed swoon and faint would be an IDEAL way to get out of this disaster, if only she could manage it.

Juliet sat beside her with a grin plastered to her face, pressed flat to her head as the marcel wave she’d gotten that morning. She could see the regret in her eyes, her stiff expression. Pauline felt only confusion; wasn’t this what Juliet had wanted, too? Soon enough they would be together again forever, lying on a yacht in the baking heat of the California sun, writing the novels they’d planned on composing on their rare free weekends, the ones that weren’t taken up by acting. It would happen now – no one would dream of separating them. Missus Hulme understood, and she would save them…Poor Juliet needed to keep her faith for just a moment longer.

She slipped a hand in Juliet’s and felt a brief squeeze in response, calm pouring over her nerves as they were asked to rise for the judge.

***

Juliet found this trial business an entirely disagreeable proposition. They didn’t ask as much of her as they did Pauline (of course they didn’t, Missus Rieper wasn’t her mother – she was mearly a murder, while Pauline was matricidal), so much of her time was spent reiterating Pauline’s story, echoing her every word like a lost Chordette.

She didn’t know how she felt about the mess, until she looked at Pauline.

Then, all of the strife seemed worthwhile.

***

The conviction that came down that hot August morning was only a surprise to the two girls waiting to hear it. The dark-haired one let out a shriek, and the golden-haired one buried her face in her hands, ashamed, sobbing, their free hands linked together in a tangle of bone and flesh until two guards strong-armed them apart.

***

Her cell was small, cramped and ugly, a deep green color with a small barred window, shared with another woman twice her age that had killed her husband through asphyxiation. Juliet tried not to bother her – she spent her days hunched in the corner of her cell, reading novels and magazines bought on credit, delivered by relatives.

When she closes her eyes, she drifts back to the Fourth Kingdom, where the goddesses and gods of Borovnia weep for the absence of Charles.

***

Pauline sits in solitary confinement, staring at the walls, her face pressed to the cold cement. It had been a century or two since she’d seen her, her beatific love, the center of her fantasies. She ended up in a private cell somehow, perhaps because they were afraid she would become the victim of a thrill killer “just like her.” She had been made quite aware of the dirt under her nails, the fact of her faults.

“Deborah,” she muttered into the sleeve of her prison uniform, imagining the golden world, the sweet impassioned calls of the Borovnian nation for their chosen people.

****

Several days later, Juliet received a small clay figure in the mail, anonymously postmarked, anonymously delivered. She wondered how and who and why anyone would aid her. She was aware of her badness now, as if it leeched through her skin. She was a a dirty thing, and everyone told her she was bound for hell. She accepted it as a fact, like a beggar might accept meal and water.

Inside the package was a small clay figure, awkwardly molded in the shape of a woman with a long torso, elongated feet and hands. She saw herself in the almond shape of its eyes.

It took her several days to turn the figure over and read the words carved upon its feet.

“Hilary,” it read.

Juliet took it as a clue and kept it close to her heart: a sign from the heavens. She would go out into the world looking for Hilary, not Pauline.

***

Eventually, as for all young children, independence day rolled around. The parole board threw them both out like befouled bathwater at the end of their five year sentence, declaring them model citizens and perfect examples of the penal system’s ability to rehabilitate. Juliet found herself sitting in the back of Perry’s limousine, ferried to the drop-off point of his new home with her mother. Of course she could stay with them – for a while – if she could only find something to do with her time.

Juliet finally decided on the power and freedom of jet propulsion. Handing out pillows and peanuts fifty thousand feet in the air seemed a breeze compared to staring down lawyers and prisoners, after all, and this way she could see the universe at large, and learn about it. She could never stay in New Zealand again.

So why not see the world?

***

Pauline chose horses – a fact others found interesting, as she had never touched one before her stay in prison. On a solid back, riding to the pounding tune of a heart, she wasn’t THAT Pauline Rieper anymore – just a woman with an accomplished understanding of horseflesh.

She came by her experience the hard way – starting as a stable hand in a public park in Kent, earning her time in the saddle. Eventually, she made enough to open a small school, one that won praise from the horsey set, who approved of her riding circle and the way she handled the children, cared for the disabled ones who used her school for therapy. She soon found herself keeping pace with the elite families of the town, accepted as she had never been when she was plain Pauline.

 _Hilary_. The name breathed success and wealth, and glorious prosperity. A name worthy of….

No, she wouldn’t think of that place. Not consciously, if she could force herself.

But at night she dreamed of those golden times, her soul crying out for the beauty of the warm shores of Borovia.

***

It was, quite simply, an accident. She had been sitting at a café in Kent during a stopover, on her way to the Netherlands, running over the pages of her first serious manuscript. The young woman in a tweed suit, her hair severely tied back, had bumped into her table and spilled the coffee everywhere

Cursing, Anne had leapt up to protect her works when the other woman had begun apologizing profusely. Her anger had dissipated slowly at the sight of those eyes – somehow still innocent and trusting - and by the time she thought to speak to the one who had intruded upon her dreams she…

Her mind skipped a beat in concert with her heart, words eluding her, clogging her throat.

The intruder finally said, “my name is Hillary,” extending a hand.

She knew. The connection between them glowed golden like a brand.

“Anne,” she declared, smoothly and without hesitation.

A knowing glimmer lit Hilary’s expression. They had to be acquaintances in public, but in private, they were the same two girls who had cried out so longingly for one another in the night.

****

And so they atoned together on the craggy, foggy moors of Scotland; Anne in her office, writing reams of mystery novels bourn of blood and justice; Hilary astride her horse, holding a child to her chest as she taught a six year old how to canter. Some would say they made a mockery of justice. Others would call it a story of love misplaced. But the two women never saw each other as anything more than two sweet lovers, two close companions. They never made it to Hollywood, but who needed to act when they had the glory of publishing fame and equine joy? Everyone thought they were simply a nice lesbian couple and admired, if not respected, the love they obviously had for each other.

But under the veneer of respectability and finery, Anne and Hilary both knew they were Juliet and Pauline, the moideresses from Christchurch. But they now were so much more than that. And when they looked in each other’s eyes they could see the bright shimmer of Borovnia, glowing in the distance, waiting for the future, for them.

They were left alone to justify and glory in that love, make it a thing of passion and not madness. And they made it their responsibility to live up to it every single day.


End file.
